The reward for doing a good job is more work

A buddy of mine said that his company suddenly and unexpectedly announced 15 layoffs, including his manager and two employees on his team. Those employees received three months of salary as part of their severance package. My buddy remains with the company having to take on seven additional clients for no additional compensation. Some have referred to this scenario as "the living shall envy the dead." I prefer my quote: The reward for doing a good job is more work.

A company has never laid me off, but my time in management has informed me about how the process works. The official term is a reduction in force (RIF). In general, unless nepotism or favoritism is at play, the worst-performing employees are the first ones to be let go. In fact, those employees should probably have been terminated before the RIF, but the arduous process of terminating someone usually encourages managers to "just deal with them." 

One time I was promoted to a manager role, and within a couple of weeks, our department was told to eliminate one position. We did a "rack-em stack-em," and the two employees at the bottom of the list were practically a statistical tie based on productivity and quality numbers. This wasn't a surprise to me because I was the lead for both of them at one time, and I saw their work firsthand. There was hesitancy about choosing one of the employees because of her ethnicity (the other one was white.) I floated the idea that we should terminate both of them. If the higher-ups asked for one, then they should be doubly happy with two. They were, and we eliminated both positions.

Had these employees been terminated earlier, we would have been able to replace them with more qualified employees. Instead, we lost two positions and had to pick up the slack. At least we didn't have to waste any more time monitoring their performance and correcting their mistakes.